Slashdot Mirror
Is Distributed Computing Being Distributed Badly?
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Distributed computing could help researchers studying climate change or Alzheimer's, but SETI@home's search for extra-terrestrial intelligence continues to dominate. Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes says that's a big waste, especially because SETI doesn't seem likely to yield results: 'This continued fascination with living-room SETI comes as professional setiologists concede that early assumptions about the search for intelligent life -- notably those popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan -- have proven naively optimistic. For instance, it's now conceded there is little chance of detecting the "leaking" transmissions of another planet -- its version of "I Love Lucy" broadcasts. Those signals are too weak to stand out from the universe's background noise.' Gomes also traces the origins of SETI@home to Berkeley computer scientist David P. Anderson, and explains that users stuck with the ET search rather than medical investigations in part because of nationalistic competition. Yet Anderson no longer runs SETI@home. 'Instead, he donates his spare computer power to a global warming project. But he doesn't presume to tell others what they ought to be doing with their CPU cycles.'"
of course the WSJ would much rather you where crunching numbers for their drugs companies under the guise of "fighting cancer" or "protein folding" so your results can be turned into their profit (you didnt think that cure/treatment would be free like your CPU did you?)
searching for ET is not profitable so it must be bad
"Instead, he donates his spare computer power to a global warming project"
Does this attempt to determine how much global warming is being caused by donating CPU cycles.
I am doing the BBC global warming, but a lot of CPU hours got wasted when they found one of the input files was duff http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/up dates1.shtml DOH!,/p>
I could have wasted that time looking for aliens.
Anyway, what is that guys problem, no amount of theory will prove or disprove if aliens watch TV like us. We need to at least look for them to prove anything.
Why would we want to contact another civilization until we are unified as a race and have advanced military and consumer technology? The ultimate in naivete is the projection done by utopian academics who equate advancement with peaceful civilization. If we as a race are any indication, and we're all we have to go by, it's safe to assume the opposite. The more advanced we've become, the less valuable human life has become and the more intrusion we tolerate from the authorities. For the love of God, the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago. In Britain, there's a movement to monitor every child's eating habits and American intrusion is legendary in its own right!
Let's face one little truth. Going on OUR evolutionary path, we MUST proceed with caution into space. We should avoid seeking out other races until we can approach them with confidence.
BS. Humans have shown that unless faced with a challenge, they tend to become lazy and stupid. Only a truly daunting challenge brings out the best in human nature, so it makes sense that only the challenge of facing an advanced alien race could possibly get us all together with the same agenda.
Of course there will still be the fringe whackos who actively work against the rest of the human race (we welcome our alien overlords!) but the majority always rises to the challenge and a challenge presented to everyone without bias or exclusion will get everyone's attention and focus of effort.
You make carbon based energy expensive. It's that simple.
While that isn't happening you know your government aren't taking global warming seriously and if they aren't, you should probably ask yourself why you should take it seriously.
Deleted
He should start kissing my ass if he wants to presume to tell me what I "should be" donating my spare computing cycles to.
Instead of spending billions of dollars on advertising, Merck, Eli Lily and Pfizer should be buying computing clusters to do their own fucking research. They're the one's who'll get rich(er) off of it.
This asshat really thinks he is taking the moral high ground? Fuck him. It's my computer and it's my decision what I'll do with my spare CPU cycles.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
That summary is more than a page and a half long on my screen (800x600), because the author doesn't know a thing about Slashdot and submitted a summary that looks more like a WSJ article.
Why can't the Story Accepters do a little editing on the side? It would have looked perfectly okay if you'd cut it off at "likely to yield results":
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes
It seems perfectly interesting and complete just like that. Why did we need the other two thirds?
Hint: That's what the link is for. You provide a good summary of the issue being talked about, and if we find it interesting, we click the link (or we head straight for the comments section and argue about it). You don't provide an entire page of stuff on the issue, because that's just not the format that we come to Slashdot for in terms of regular news stories. That only works for book reviews, editorials, and odd news stories that need the extra detail.
This, on the other hand, is an opinion piece on distributed computing. It's a very typical Slashdot article, and should have had a very typical Slashdot summary.
Okay, I'm not finding a cure for Alzheimer's, but at least I'm exploring the world of the Flying Spaghetti Monster with http://www.darwinathome.org.
I currently work for a pharmaceutical company, and in a visit to a research lab I learned just how much computing power they throw at these problems. They do have supercomputers, intranet clusters, etc. to try to solve these problems. They are so incredibly complex, however, that those are not enough.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
While I agree with the principle here, don't forget that with legalized banking fraud ("fractional reserve banking") they don't have to actually print more money to increase the effective amount of currency; they can simply lower the mandantory reserve ratio. Should the LBF system ever fail, the FDIC will be forced to step in and print massive amounts of paper currency to back all those accounts.
Conversely, credit contraction (higher interest rate & reserve ratio) has a deflationary effect equivalent to that of taking paper currency out of circulation. While I do believe that the long-term trend is toward inflation, indications are that we may be approaching a credit contraction phase, and thus short-term deflation. It may or may not manage to balance out the overall inflationary trend, but it's something to watch for none the less.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
The reasoning behind this is straightforward. If you accept the idea of a technological singularity, and believe that our technology has brought us to the point where we are on the threshold of such an event, and that this is the natural evolution of a technological civilization, then in the blink of an eye, in astronomical terms, our footprint will be everywhere in this galaxy. (That's assuming of course that we can keep from destroying ourselves for a few more decades.) The same would be true for any other technological civilization.
It's the same idea that Enrico Fermi had in mind when he asked: if there are other intelligences in the universe then "where are they?" You wouldn't have to look for them. They'd already be here. Conclusion: don't bother listening. We've met the spacemen, and they is us.
well i think google should come here and join their paypal rivaling system of payments with some distributed computing software which would earn money for users running computations on their hardware for big bussiness companies paying. i would say that this would earn big bucks to everyone - and google will rule the world! its such a waste of money running computers at 0% cpu speed. i just hope for someone to send me some money for bringing this new idea to the world :)
Radio SETI is really a waste of time. Optical SETI is the logical choice because;
1) Visible light-emitting devices are smaller and lighter than microwave or radio-emitting devices.
2) Visible light-emitting devices produce higher bandwidths and can consequently send information much faster.
3) Interference from natural sources of microwaves is more common than from visible sources.
4) Naturally occurring nanosecond pulses of light are mostly likely nonexistent, although there are all kinds of radio signals that could be similar to intentional SETI transmissions. Thus Optical SETI does not require grid computing to find signals.
5) Exact frequencies of light are not required, as nanosecond unfiltered light pulses would still outshine the planet's star by over 30 times.
Optical SETI detection out to 100 light-years is doable today, with a bit more work optical SETI out to 1,000 light-years is possible.
Optical SETI paper
"As you can see by their actions, rather than their words... Notably at Stanford University, Washington University, Munich University, Scripps Research Institute, Oxford University etc.
p
http://folding.stanford.edu/about.html
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/rah_about.php
http://boinc.bio.wzw.tum.de/boincsimap/project.ph
http://predictor.scripps.edu/about_team.php
http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/index.htm
So... Who are you again? Yeah, you're a guy reading Slashdot... Getting much research done?"
Grr....I can't let this go.....
I'm a guy who was once associated with one of labs/projects mentioned above. I was working on the problem for years, and have a great deal of expertise in the area.
I can also tell you that the project is complete and utter crap, from a scientific perspective. The PI routinely misrepresents the project goals, claiming "possible" results that could never, ever come from the type of research performed. In general, the "science" is poorly-conceived and improperly controlled, and most of the "experiments" are methodologically flawed. I can't post my name here...it would be career suicide.
As one of the authorities to whom you seem so desperate to appeal, let me assure you: if you are devoting your resources to this project, the world would be a better place if you simply turned your computer off.